HOUSTON (May 2, 1995) -- By combining the two billion-operations-per-second horsepower of the TMS320C80 (MVP) with a software implementation of the international H.320 videoconferencing standard, Texas Instruments announced today a complete digital signal processing solution providing full-motion video with image quality superior to any other H.320 chip or chip set implementation. TI's DSP solution is already helping videoconferencing customers design systems that will revolutionize the way we communicate.
First demonstrated at the CeBIT conference in Hanover, Germany, March 8-15, the new 'C80 implementation of the H.320 standard puts TI at the forefront of the videoconferencing market. It moves the company toward a major DSP marketing objective: To become the world leader in videoconferencing solutions in 1996. It also opens the door to quality videoconferencing on millions of desktop computers.
TI's highly integrated 'C80-based solution is the only product available today that takes maximum advantage of the H.320 standard to produce superior-quality video, while other silicon makers are offering chipsets that merely comply with the standard.
The 'C80 is the first videoconferencing solution to integrate H.320 video compression/decompression as well as audio compression/decompression on a single chip-compared to comparable chipset solutions which must separate the video and audio processing into several devices. The new TI H.320 software library includes standard H.261 video compression along with audio modules G.728, G.722 and G.711 and communication modules H.221, H.242 and H.230.
"In a cooperative development with IAT and IBM, Deutsche Telekom has developed a TMS320C80-based interactive point of sales/point of information system using H.320-based video communication over ISDN lines," said Gerhard Gatzmann, product manager for multimedia systems at Deutsche Telekom AG. "We will introduce this system to the market in the second half of 1995. Because of the 'C80's full programmability, we can optimize our system to offer additional features and have the flexibility to quickly react to the requirements of our customers. In addition, the extraordinary computing power of the 'C80 is critical for a high-quality audio/video communication system such as ours. TI's DSP solution, based on the 'C80, allows Deutsche Telekom to adapt our product offering according to the market's requirements."
According to 'C80 marketing manager Julie Gallagher, "As proven at CeBIT, the quality of TI's 'C80-based H.320 videoconferencing solution stands head-and-shoulders above the rest of the competition. The demo tells the whole story."
Gallagher added, "Many of the H.320 systems available today appear to include such minimal implementations of the standard that the resulting quality is, essentially, unusable. I think that seeing these poorer implementations has given a lot of people the idea that H.320 is inherently poor. With a 'C80 implementation, the standard can provide video quality that is significantly better than most people have come to expect from videoconferencing."
TI's new solution achieves superior video quality because of the processor's ability to perform two billion operations per second. In addition, the 'C80's full programmability, far greater than other H.320 chipsets, allows customers to take better advantage of compression
standards today and support video quality enhancement techniques in the future-all on a single chip.
TI's H.320 implementation is just the beginning of the TMS320 DSP department's commitment to the videoconferencing and video telephone markets. TI will also support the new H.324 video phone and videoconferencing standard on the TMS320C80 and its derivatives. The 'C80 also can support a wide range of compression algorithms, including JPEG, MPEG and other industry standards to integrate a wide range of multimedia functions on a single add-in board.
A complete set of software tools allows developers of videoconferencing systems to add their own enhancements either within the standards or with proprietary techniques. The programmability of the 'C80 and the software tools not only encourage product differentiation, they also facilitate upgrades to take advantage of advances in audio and video compression.
The 'C80 integrates on the same silicon four 32-bit advanced DSPs, a 32-bit RISC processor with a floating point unit, a video controller with dual frame timers, a transfer controller, and 50 Kbytes of memory. The industry's highest-performing DSP, the 'C80 is capable of handling more than two billion operations per second, which represents a ten-fold increase in performance over previous DSPs.
TI's H.320 software library is available now direct from TI under license in a variety of forms depending on customer needs. TI offers source code, object code and mixed source/object code. Future developments to meet end users' increasing multimedia requirements are slated to include real-time MPEG record and playback and V.34 modem capability.
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